Friday, February 1, 2013

The Order Of The Stick: Start of Darkness - A No Flying No Tights Review

It is said that everyone is the hero of their own story. Even the
vilest villains in history did not consider themselves to be bad people.
Yet fiction is filled with villains who lack any further motivation
than being evil for evil’s sake. Even Shakespeare had characters like
Don John the Bastard, who refused to give any reason for his villainy
save “…it better fits my blood to be disdained…”

There is a reason for this. Villains need to be villainous in order
to be dramatically effective. Delve too deeply into a bad guy’s past or
motivations and the writer runs the risk of making him more sympathetic
than the hero. And while some writers have had success in telling the
villain’s side of the story (Wicked comes to mind
immediately) it is generally a bad idea for a writer of genre fiction to
try and buck that trend. Somehow, artist Rich Burlew
was able to overcome this difficulty and tell a tale that expands the
backgrounds of his two main villains while simultaneously exploring the
nature of evil, both philosophically and within the confines of a
narrative structure. Not bad for a stick-figure comic, eh?

Start of Darkness is the second original graphic novel based on Burlew’s immensely popular web comic, The Order of the Stick. Originally a simple comic that poked fun at the rules of Dungeons and Dragons and how they would play out in a real fantasy world, OOTS
has blossomed into a fully-fledged epic in its own right. Now the strip
features more humor based on its characters and the conventions of the
fantasy genre than it does jokes about the difficulty in figuring out
the mechanical difference between a charge and a bull-rush.

Our story focuses primarily upon Redcloak, a goblin cleric who is
elevated to the position of High Priest of his religion after his mentor
and his tribe are killed by rampaging knights out to “cleanse the land
of evil.” Granted the knowledge of his predecessors, Redcloak goes into
hiding with his younger brother and begins work upon a sacred (or is
that profane?) quest. The (un)holy plan? Join forces with a sorcerer of
equal power and use a ritual devised by their deity to unmake the world
and create something more equitable for all the monstrous humanoids
currently eking out sad lives lurking in swamps and living in caves,
waiting to become a footnote on some human hero’s path to glory.

Enter Xykon, a down-on-his-luck evil overlord/necromancer who is long
in the tooth and short on ethics. He seems the perfect pawn for
Redcloak’s plans, except he’s not much for planning and gets bored quite
easily. And when Xykon gets bored, he tends to start killing minions.
After all, it’s not like he can’t bring them back as zombies if he needs
them for something besides target practice later, right? Still,
Redcloak will try to persevere even as he finds himself becoming more of
a minion than a partner to the power-mad sorcerer, thinking it will all
be worth it in the end.

Burlew’s stick-figure art won’t win any awards, but it’s amazing how
he can tell such a complex story with such simple figures. The artwork
may be simplistic but this is an emotionally and structurally deep
story, despite the series’ usual comedic tone. One can’t help but feel
some sympathy for Redcloak as he sinks deeper and deeper into depravity,
crossing line after line in his righteous crusade against human
superiority.

Despite being the first story in The Order of the Stick saga chronologically, this is a bad book for readers to start with. Check out the original web comic
from the beginning and then come back to this volume after the first
300 strips or so. You’ll appreciate it a lot more. Like the Dungeons and Dragons
game, this book is appropriate for teenage audiences and older,
provided you have no objections to cartoonish depictions of children
being killed, souls being trapped, and gratuitous breaking of the fourth
wall by demonic, genre-savvy roaches.

The Order Of The Stick: Start of Darkness
by Rich Burlew
ISBN: 9780976658047
Giant in the Playground, 2008
Publisher Age Rating: (13+)